Pigs

Director - Marc Lawrence (Maverick)
Starring - Toni Lawrence (Sole Survivor), Jesse Vint (Grimm), and Catherine Ross (Harlow)
Release Date - 1972
Genre - Horror
Tagline - "Once the pigs tasted blood...no one could control their hunger"
Format - Bluray (Personal Collection) (screener)

Rating (out of 5):

     I needed some Troma in my life after reviewing the early shorts of Clive Barker.  Barker is a hell of a filmmaker who has made several memorable horror films but Salome and The Forbidden were horrible.  After watching these I needed something good to watch so I turned to Troma's Pigs which was recently released on blu by Vinegar Syndrome.  Thi is one of the Troma films I have been after for years but something would always happen before I could get my grubby little hands on it.  The first time I tried to order it amazon.com sent me a different film in it's place.  To this day that is the only time that has ever happened.  The second time I got a copy I had worked it out in a trade but the disc was so scratched it wouldn't play.  I gave up and finally was able to get a copy when Vin Syn sent me a review copy.  Thanks guys!

     The film follows an older man who owns a restaurant and also raises his own pigs for slaughter.  His pigs has an insatiable appetite for humans flesh so he has been killing and feeding people to his hogs.  One day a young girl arrives at his farm and he hires her to work as his diner and allows her to stay in his home.  What he doesn't know is that she killed her father who was sexually abusing her and escaped from a mental health facility.  When she comes across a man who makes a sexual advancement on her she kills them and the old man cleans up her mess and feeds them to the pig.  The mental hospital hired a detective to find her and he does.  However, she kills him resulting in the hospital calling the local police who spot the girl and attempt to apprehend her.
     I hate when I assume the movie goes one way and the second you toss it in you realize you were a fucking idiot.  The whole time I was after Pigs I assumed it was a movie about killer pigs in the same lines as Night of the Lepus.  I was very, very wrong.  The acting in this one is decent.  The cast really showed dedication to their roles and had previous experience but there was something lacking.  Dedication may have been there but conviction was absent.  The whole cast works well together and every scene is the same as the last but the cast is far from perfect.  The story for this one is fun considering.  I really enjoyed the serial killer feeding people to the pigs angle and I loved the twist at the ending with the young girl being mentally disturbed but I was expecting more to it than that.  The film is titled Pigs but the pigs just play a minor role in the film.  Hell, we don't even get to see them eat anyone!  Finally, the film does have some on screen kills that are bloody and fun but are not that gory or imaginative.  In my mind I was expecting to see pigs devouring people and gore spilled everywhere.  Instead, we gut knife stab wounds and straight razor slashes.  Though they were fun it was still a big let down.  Overall, Pigs is a great movie but the title plays too much with the viewer's imagination.  The film's original Daddy's Deadly Darlings was a far better title that fit the story a hell of a lot better.  The film is fun just don't expect killer pigs like I did!